What is RCGC?

What is RCGC?

What lurks at the basement of the Computer Center (CC)? Robots, virtual worlds? Almost, but not entirely. Huge supercomputers lurk at the basement of the CC equipped with 6,768 gigabytes of memory and capable of working at 252 Tera-FLOPS, which doesn’t sound cool to those who don’t know what it means, but in reality it means trillions of calculations are going on per second, thousands times faster than your regular desktop computer, some of the fastest in the world. Also at the CC is a virtual reality lab called AZ-LIVE, that provides a three dimensional virtual reality for anyone who needs it, for research, architecture, medicine, engineering, and more. 

Image

Shepherding these computing resources is the Research Computing Governance Committee (RCGC). Comprised of researchers and IT professionals, this interdisciplinary group provides counsel to guide the development of central research computing resources at UA in order to best serve the needs of researchers across campus. By launching new pilot projects and implementing new policies and procedures for these shared computing resources, RCGC has expanded their advanced computing resources with a more efficient and effective system. 

In the past it was hard for some researchers to get ahead because they required supercomputers for their research, but to get a supercomputer, one needs grants and money. Now communal resources under “shared governance” by the RCGC committee has created a more efficient system in which multiple faculty and staff around campus work together to provide shared resources and create more efficient policies. The RCGC provides recommendations to the university, advising them what programs and resources are needed, while avoiding duplication of effort. “This method of collaboration by the RCGC saves resources, time, and is bringing in more money, because staff is collectively going in together and pulling resources and is going after the big grants for research possibilities, and sharing resources.” Prof. Joellen Russell, chair of RCGC and Associate Professor of Geoscience and Planetary Science describes this as “growing the pie,” because RCGC is not “pay to play” like other big and small research universities – UA researchers have access to the entire system even before they have funding to contribute to growing the system.

As the prevalence of Big Data - computing of complex sets of information - continues to permeate research in the 21st Century, a wider variety of researchers have sought out the computing resources offered by UA. “Almost everybody is using research computing,” says Russell.

With a growing body of constituents interested in use of the High Performance and High Throughput Computing systems at UA, a more collaborative data sharing and policy procedure has been enacted by the RCGC. With an emphasis on efficiency and accessibility, RCGC policies allow researchers to facilitate the sharing of information, effectively enabling researchers from different departments the ability to access their shared data. 

“I’m stuck” says Russell, “this is the best place ever … we are pulling up our socks here and getting to work, it is really an exciting time here for supercomputing”. 

Researchers in many different fields such as Optics, Humanities, Fine Arts, Engineering, Pharmacy, Chemistry, and more have started to use the resources that the University of Arizona has to offer through RCGC recommendations. 

These computing resources, developed through RCGC recommendations are housed in the University of Arizona UITS data center, where information is securely maintained and the entire system is expertly administered, and maintained by UITS Research, Computing, Systems, and Operations.

Image

The RCGC is co-sponsored by VPR Jennifer Barton, CIO Michele Norin, SVPRHS Joe Garcia, and the Dean of Libraries Karen Williams. The main work of RCGC takes place in the RCGC subcommittees.  The RCGC subcommittees include: HPC 2015 (Chair: Mike Bruck), Big Data (Chair: Paulo Goes), Data Management and Curation (Chair: Chris Kollen), HPC Policies (Chair: Susan Miller), RDC Policies and Co-Location (Chair: Nirav Merchant), and Network (Chair: Dragana Vasic). The following is a list of RCGC members, who contribute to the growing of research on campus.